April 3, 1988

THERE WAS NEVER ONE SO FAIR: When Schlumberger sold Fairchild Semiconductor to rival National Semiconductor a few months ago, an era ended. Fairchild was a particularly virile progenitor in Silicon Valley — the number of companies it begat is awe-inspiring.

So now that the party is truly over, a new one will begin. A reunion of “Fairchildren,” as the alums affectionately call themselves, will take place Thursday, April 14. They aren’t saying where.

Most of the most famous Fairchildren will attend. Who knows who will actually show, but I hear party dates were juggled many times to accommodate some of them, including Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, founders of Intel; Jerry Sanders of Advanced Micro Devices; Charlie Sporck of National, and the list goes on.

A party organizer, Geri Hadley, now at LSI Logic (another Fairchild spawn), worked in public relations there for 15 years. Sentiment and story swapping — “the stories are unprintable” — will run high. Fred Hoar, former FairChild VP of communications, will conduct a Valley roast. Considering the crowd, it should manage to pinch the cheeks of just about everyone there. A slide show, T-shirt and phone book display will span the company’s 20-plus-year history.

There will be only 600 tickets, all sold in advance, Hadley says. If you’re a Fairchild alumnus and want to go, call (408) 433-7096. Be prepared to prove who you are. Hadley estimates that 30,000 to 50,000 people worked at the company at one time or another, so obviously not everyone can go.

ROLL OVER, PLAY DEAD: The quips didn’t stop when Steve Jobs stepped off the stage at last Tuesday’s Software Publishers Association luncheon. When he stepped back to his table, he was overheard saying that software vendors concerned about the Apple-Microsoft-Hewlett-Packard lawsuit “should read Gandhi.” He referred to Mahatma Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolent resistance to oppression. If vendors followed a course of nonviolence, Jobs figures, they’d just stop developing software for Apple until the company drops the lawsuit. And, of course, develop software for Next instead.

SPEAKING OF WAR: Funny that Jobs should be talking about nonviolence. Once upon a time, when he and Steve Wozniak were still shaping culture at Apple, they attracted top engineers to the company because they were avid about refusing to do military work.

But today concern is growing among technical employees at Apple, as well as at Jobs’ Next and Pixar in San Rafael, about the courting of lucrative military contracts by these once-counterculture firms.

Apple, for example, is bucking big-time for the Army’s “command and control” system contract. kt’s grown from a $2.4 billion to a $20 billion project, according to the General Accounting Office, and is expected to stretch out over 20 years. “If Apple gets it, it will transform the corporation,” an insider says. There’s talk that some Apple engineers are very concerned about the military nature of the project.

Also, there’s talk that H. Ross Perot, who has invested heavily in Jobs’ machine, is pushing Next as a defense industry computer. Jobs’ reaction is unknown. But the concept isn’t a far reach, considering that many of the university customers Jobs wants conduct intense military research. “Star Wars” researchers are supposedly going ape over Pixar’s graphics work stations. Jobs owns controlling interest in that company, too.

CORPORATE YOGA PAYS OFF: Paracomp, the San Francisco science and engineering software company, says it has just beaten both Apple and Microsoft for rights to publish and distribute a “wysiwyg” (that’s “what-you-see-is-what-you-get”) symbolic equation processor called Milo. It allows scientists and engineers to do symbolic math like algebra “the way you want it done,” says Paracomp president Bill Woodward. They can use familiar math symbols to solve a problem instead of having to learn a programming language.

“I know Apple offered at least six figures in cold, hard cash for Milo,” Woodward says. “They were going to put it in the (Macintosh Programmers Workshop) library and put it in the Mac’s ROM (read-only memory).”

Paracomp has only 14 employees, and Woodward says it paid far less for the program. Why? “We were very flexible.” The program will ship in May.

Write to Denise Caruso, Business Desk, San Francisco Examiner, P.O. Box 7260, San Francisco, CA 94120. Or contact her by computer using MCI Mail (Denise Caruso).